Infosys suffers from senior management crisis

Indian outsourcing outfitInfosys is finding itself short of senior managers.

The company issued a statement insisting that it had enough senior managers to run the business even if more executives clean out their desks and flee India’s second-largest IT services exporter.

N.R. Narayana Murthy played down the departure of at least 11 senior executives since he was brought back from retirement in June last year to help regain market share.

“We are confident that we have enough budding leaders to handle any eventuality of some more people leaving us,” Murthy, who stepped down as the chairman of the company on Saturday, told an annual shareholders meeting.

Still the rate of exits is pretty grim. More than 18.7 percent left at the end of March which is 2.4 percentage points higher than a year earlier, out of a workforce of more than 160,000.

Exits included at least 11 top executives, some of whom were responsible for key business sectors at the company, which was founded by Murthy and six other engineers in 1981.

He said that he didn’t want some of them anyway because they were “low performers.” Why he hired limbo dancers in the first place is anyone’s guess.

Infosys has for the first time picked an outsider – Vishal Sikka, former senior executive at German software company SAP AG as CEO.

Sikka, 47, is considered to be an innovator in the global software industry, particularly when it comes to software which is so esoteric no one is sure what it does. A computer scientist by training, he was key in developing and marketing SAP’s flagship product, HANA, which is believed to help firms analyse large amounts of data quickly, or at least something like that.